Granta to Glenda

If my dying laptop were capable of a picture-upload (I never thought I would use such a phrase: it may not even be right) I would be heading this post with pink female genitalia in the form of a purse or maybe a purse in the form of pink female genitalia. If you want to know which formulation would be the more appropriate you can go to Mary Beard's blog, have a look - and come straight back of course.

Last Sunday I was at the Cambridge Wordfest event to discuss the state of literary journalism and had watched the excellent Granta's editor, John Freeman, present his SEX edition of Granta, with full frontal/small-change cover, at an audience, many of them women critics, who had quizzed me, even before we began our debate, about the ratio of female to male reviewers at the TLS and elsewhere.

I admired John's boldness in presenting his magazine in what might (well, at least might) have been hostile feminist territory.

I shared Mary Beard's sense that something could have gone wrong, though, since it was a Sunday breakfast event, we were none of us perhaps in the most feisty state ourselves.

The Granta launch party was a few days later, and the venue was a place called Coco de Mer.  By that time I had put the issue out of my mind. I supposed that Coco de Mer had to be some sort of seafood restaurant - and told the taxi-driver so. She hadn't heard of it either.

So, when my next conversations about Granta's SEX issue cover came along, I was a bit surprised to be talking about it in a South Kensington lingerie-and-fetish shop, even more than I had been in Corpus Christi Cambridge's McCrum Theatre.

But I didn't meet any woman at Coco de Mer, among the glass designer phalli and soft leather collars, who disapproved of it either.

Many loved it. One said we would be collecting the items in future, including our Granta, like antiquities from Pompeii.

I didn't take names but Kit Alexander's response to Mary's blog
 was typical enough.
"We received our copy through the post the other day, and, although I'm a very strong feminist, my first reaction was just to laugh. I was surprised Granta had the balls, if you'll pardon the expression.

I suppose the line between comical and offensive is partly determined by the level of wit. For me, it was witty enough that it achieved the provocative purpose of art. How different would it have been if it were a photo, or a painting, or of male genitals? It has to be subjective - so although I can see why you might be offended, I wasn't."

I even met one woman who agreed with Mary's commenter, Itumpi

"I’m surprised that no-one in your gathering mentioned the magazine cover. It is stunning. It is a shockingly powerful image. No art director or editor would refuse this cover - it’s a winner. As a graphics person I’d be very interested to see the rest of the choices the designers offered the editor. This image sustains its double identity effortlessly. When you explore the purse image you come to its movement, the click of the snapping shut of the purse and your mind jumps to paintings of women by William de Kooning where he takes the mouth with its teeth and moves it through 90 degrees and places it where the vulva should be. This is powerful stuff. It’s really difficult to use a metaphor for the male genitalia as successfully as this. You end up in the really banal territory of bananas and oranges or snakes or guns and so on. No contest."

I might have read more of the issue itself by now - including the respectable showing by women writers that John had spoken of - if I hadn't agreed to chair one of our local hustings debates for the Hampstead and Kilburn parliamentary seat on Thursday night. Politics is getting quite nasty on our streets, especially since the esteemed success of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg in the national televised debate also on Thursday night.

It's like a playground fight here - with two always ganging up on one. The Tory and Labour candidates abuse the Lib Dem for even existing, such is their certainty that only one of the main parties can win. The Lib Dem and Labour gang up on the Tory over fox-hunting (which he is not unequivocally against) and over whether the Tory's would-be Home Secretary should be sacked for privately defending an owner of a small hotel who wanted to exclude gay couples. The Tory and Lib Dem ought, one might think, to try to gang up against Labour's veteran MP, Glenda Jackson, but that seems harder. Those two really, really hate each other.

Nationally, we are waiting till next Thursday to see how the sides line up.

Meanwhile I am much looking forward to my Granta - and to getting away to rerun our Cambridge debate at Perugia for a day or two as soon as the volcanic glass cloud from Iceland  blows away.

Comments

[Open Discussion]

More visual work in response to this issue of Granta at http://thisisnotapurse.com/

[Candadai Tirumalai]

I have followed British general elections since 1973-74, and this one seems as closely balanced as any: at least from across the pond. Some weeks ago James Cameron looked a sure bet but since then Gordon Brown appears to have closed the gap considerably, with Nick Clegg diluting Mr. Cameron's powerful appeal. The Hampstead and Kilburn contest may well have a foreordained result (victory for Glenda Jackson) but your account of the debate suggests some of the national trends at work.